Through Jungle and Desert...

As I promised, I´m following up on my last post with more African Forces. I´ve been building these up quickly during the last days to get both the Desert Camo and Bushland Camo groups to roughly platoon strength. With the casts of my sculpts at hands and using some remaining unpainted figs from my Christmas Calender, I have a good supply of manpower for them. I´m planning to use them for Chain of Command, which got released on Wednesday. I´ve already read the pdf and so far it sounds very good and is exactly what I´ve been missing for infantry combat in Force on Force. Firepower causes more shock than kills, with shock/suppression increasingly impeding your units. You can now actually pin units in place (or force them to rout if you put even more firepower on pinned units to break them) and maneuver your assault groups into position to attack. Also, flanking has some real effect as men can´t fire through friendlies in their own unit, which enforces some kind of linear formation to bring their whole firepower to bear.
The rules also supplement all that is needed for a post-war infantry skirmish. Generic stats for Assault Rifles are in the rules (though I´ll probably count Battle-rifles such as the FN FAL as semi-automatic rifles / self loading rifles like the M1 Garand, as controlled autofire with those is pretty much impossible and even disabled on some models of the FAL.) and MGs haven´t changed much since. I´ll handle underbarrel grenades like rifle grenades for now and won´t include vehicles for my first playthrough - other than that I should be set to play with the Africans. Must think about their platoon organisation / squad structure though. But my rulebook hasn´t arrived yet anyway and I´ll probably need that to start my first game - referring to the pdf to check things is not the most convenient way to play the first game.

Anyway, back to the Africans. I´ve almost finished the first Platoon of Desert Camo troops:

24 soldiers at the ready. I´ve noticed that I´ll need another RPG-gunner or two though. And I´ll have to add a few riflemen to get the squads to 9-10 man strength, as they should be operating as completely dismounted troops for the lack of any APCs in my collection.

The Jungle Division in woodland camo has a longer way to go. 8 Soldiers are ready as part of the christmas calendar, which isn´t even a full squad. But they also got some reinforcements, and I´ll have to add more very soon for my first game of Chain of Command!

For the woodland troops, I added some helmet camouflage on  some of the troops and filled the base with more green undergrowth, which looks really cool in conjunction with their camouflage.

Apart from that, I´ve also started work on completing my two german squads. As stated earlier, I´ve 8 rifleman done and enough casts of my MG3-gunners, Panzerfaust and Grenadiers ready to bring up their strength sufficiently, so combining these into two 6-man Panzergrenadier Gruppen is most feasable for me at the moment. I´m missing some plain Riflemen to use them as Jäger Infantry.
As Panzergrenadiers operate in combined arms warfare with their AFVs, I´ve also ordered two diecast Marder (German IFVs) to complete the squads. This will add awesome firepower to the units on the ground, as both are armed with a 20mm cannon. O_O
With two 6-man squads (1 MG, 1 Grenadier, 1 Panzerfaust, 2 Rifleman + Leader) I´ll even have two Riflemen left over for a third squad, but will have to look for a leader - maybe I´ll sculpt another one real quick to bring them up to strength. And then I´ll need a Platoon HQ to get them to full strength.

 But more on that later...More Africans first